Rekonq Web Browser Hits 0.8 Stable

A new stable release of KDE web-browser Rekonq is available for download.

Billed as being ‘light, fast, and clean’, the QtWebKit-based browser offers up a nimble, feature-rich browsing experience, albeit one without much in the way of distinguishing features when compared against Google Chrome, Firefox or Opera.

So what’s new in version 0.8? A fair bit, most notably

Support for ‘Third Party’ AdBlock rules

“Do Not Track” feature

Ctrl+Num shortcuts for ‘favourite’ sites

Option to restore a tab’s browsing history.

Further details of this release can be read in a blog post by KDE developer Andrea Diamantini.

Performance

Stability seems marginally better than in previous releases. I only experienced a single crash during a 30 minute browsing period. This isn’t a scientific benchmark by any means, but previous builds were often far worse.

All of the sites I visited loaded quickly, but were a handful of secondsslower than the same pages visited in either Google Chrome or Firefox 7 – Kubuntu 11.10’s default browser.